Late Arrival at 9-Year-Old's Sleepover: a Very Messy Bear

Cops say Katherine Rice 'did the right thing' by sheltering in place as bear wreaked havoc
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 6, 2024 12:57 PM CDT
Late Arrival at 9-Year-Old's Sleepover: a Very Messy Bear
A young bear approaches the window of a home.   (Getty Images/steverts)

Katherine Rice didn't need to see the bear to know it had gotten inside her home. She'd heard enough, even before the unmistakable sound of breathing came through the door behind which she was hiding with two young girls. The Canadian woman was preparing for sleep Sunday night when she heard strange noises inside her home in Rossland, British Columbia, seven miles north of Frontier, Washington. Initially, she suspected her 9-year-old daughter and the daughter's friend, who was having a sleepover, but both girls were fast asleep in bed. That's when "I realized that a bear was in the house," Rice tells the CBC.

Rice, the two girls, and a dog ended up spending the next half hour locked in the daughter's bedroom while the bear of unknown species went room to room, ripping up flooring, poking holes in drywall, and defecating on rugs. "The bear pretty much destroyed the inside of our house," says Rice. "He flipped over furniture. He threw a chest across the room, ripping off shelves. In the bathroom, the curtains are all ripped off." The bear explored the main floor, the basement, even the upper floor where Rice and the girls were hiding. "He wrecked the room we were beside and we could hear him breathing at the door we were at," says Rice. She notes the bear wouldn't have had much trouble breaking down the door, "but for some reason he didn't, which we're all thankful for."

"This was a scary incident for them, as it would be for anyone," Trail RCMP Sgt. Mike Wicentowich says in a statement, per the Rossland Telegraph. He adds "the family did the right thing at the right time by calling the police and sheltering in place" as trying to escape the home with a bear inside could've been dangerous. Rice later learned the bear had entered through the home's front door, which closed behind it, leaving the animal trapped. Responding police officers propped the door open, then waited for the bear to find its way out. Though Rice eventually found the contents of her fridge spread out across the kitchen floor, "it didn't really eat anything," she says of the bear. "It just made more of a mess." (More bear stories.)

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